This invention solves the problem of a current lack of products available through the commercial market to provide a reliable, ultra high pressure, latching pressure switch to act as a second environment safety for ammunition fuzing systems. This problem has existed since the added military requirement that fuzes must also have a second environmental safety that is unrelated to the primary safety.
Old ways to provide a second safety include techniques such as a commit to launch function. In such technique, the munition is given an irreversible command, such as primer ignition, to act as a second input to the fuze, for safety. In the past, other techniques proposed devices that used temperature, heat, or spin, etc, to add an additional safety environment to the fuze. Many of these devices are not easily implementable to a 120 mm, un-spun, tank munition, e.g. These ways of solving the problem are unsatisfactory because in terms of fuze safety, it has been decided that there needs to be a more robust second environment than commit to launch, e.g., whereas temperature, heat and spin, as mentioned are not easily implementable. Clearly, an improved second safety device is needed for such high caliber munitions. For a 120 mm munition, it is proposed here to make the second safety depend on acceleration. This may be accomplished with a mechanism activated by the mounting gas pressure during a launch which causes such actual physical acceleration. The proposed mechanism would be physically placed in series with the round, preferably behind it, or at least behind the fuze mechanism, but other locations for this mechanism are theoretically possible.